


The Snowdin Sickness

by Parasite Nilla (Agraulis_vanillae)



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Body Horror, Character Death, Gen, Medical Discovery, Medical Procedures, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Minor Alphys/Undyne, Nightmares, Parent Toriel (Undertale), Plague, Platonic Relationships, Post-Undertale Neutral Route - Empress Undyne Ending, Sickfic, Someone tell me if I forgot a tag, Sort Of, everyone suffers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-11
Updated: 2017-09-11
Packaged: 2018-12-26 10:20:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12056970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Agraulis_vanillae/pseuds/Parasite%20Nilla
Summary: What happens when a disease vector enters a previously unexposed population?





	The Snowdin Sickness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [undertailsoulsex](https://archiveofourown.org/users/undertailsoulsex/gifts).



> Nothing short of disaster for this cool person's birthday.

Toriel thought nothing of the bandage placed over the human child’s face, or of the clear watery discharge that ran from their nose. The human child was calm, and lethargic when she had found them in the bed of flowers, remaining prone for several minutes before taking her proffered paw. She made certain to hold their little chubby hand so that they would follow her through the maze of the Ruins without getting lost.

 

At one point a Froggit hopped forward to challenge the human, and yet they blinked owlishly at it and didn’t ACT even once it began attacking them

 

Concerned now for their safety, Toriel could not leave their side as they progressed through the Ruins. Normally, she would’ve made sure to get the ingredients for a butterscotch cinnamon pie, but the child clearly needed help and she wasn’t sure if it was a concussion or something more.

 

After leaving the child to rest for the night, she crept in only to realize that the child was sick.

 

Over the course of the next couple of weeks, Toriel recorded the onset of the symptoms, a persistent itchy red rash with bumps the size of peas, fever, and trouble breathing. She fed them a thin broth of snail soup, being sure to filter out the chunks after a couple of failed attempts to keep it down. She found herself unable to sleep during that time, every time she looked at the fallen child struggling upright to vomit or breathing laboriously in their sleep, she felt like she was caught in a bad dream.

 

Their fever broke on the third day, and soon after they were able to eat solid food although they wouldn’t touch anything with snails without turning a little green. They still had a rash all over their body, but they were  _ up _ . Scratching their sores a lot, yet they were responding to their environment with the curiosity that they didn’t have before, interacting with monsters. It didn’t seem to bother them that they were still covered in a persistent oozing rash that developed into scabs, as they discovered the limits of the Ruins and became restless.

 

Soon, they were looking to leave like all the other children did, resisting her efforts to keep them there without fighting or backing down. They stonewalled her with their determination, and soon she was forced to accept that they no longer needed her. 

 

She was alone again, watering the flowers. She was so proud that they got over their illness and recover so easily, proud that they could prove so strong yet so kind. However, later on that day after they left, she began to feel a little under the weather.

 

~

 

_ Something isn’t adding up _ , Sans thought, as he judged the human child coming through. The lady behind the door hadn’t said anything since they had appeared in front of the Ruins, and yet the child had no LV, no EXP. He was certain, so certain that they had done something to her, that his prepared response died on his rhetorical tongue when he finished his JUDGEMENT.

 

For a moment, they were both silent in that golden hall, the human sensing his hesitation, but receiving it with stoic silence. He waved it off with a “forgettaboutit.” and let them go with a clipped response unlike what he’d ever planned on saying. They seemed to know that something was on his mind and approached him with their mouth opening to speak, but he took a shortcut out of the Judgement Hall not even waiting to see how the battle with the king would go down. He had a puzzle to work out, and he approached the Ruins door recessed and buried by snow with the intent to solve it.

 

He rapped on the door one last time, waiting for a response. As expected, silence received him. Nonetheless, he tried once more, following it up with-

 

“knock knock.”

 

“who’s there?”

 

“who.”

 

“who who?”

 

“who let an owl in here?”

 

But nobody came. Sans was growing increasingly anxious, and began testing the door for any openings and received a nasty shock. When he dug his phalanges into the corner and pulled, the door ground agonizingly against the snow and gave, despite the fact that he should’ve never been able to open it in the first place. The first thing to happen was a gust of dust that blew into his face, causing him to freeze, screwing his eyesockets shut and force himself to stop breathing. Once it passed over him, he opened his eyesockets and looked into the dead silent passageway that led into the Ruins.

 

So the old lady was dusted after all. The question was, how? Dust didn’t tell tales, so there wasn’t any way of telling if the death was an accident or on purpose. He stepped through the Ruins, noting how still the air is without the weather keeping things moving like Snowdin’s storms or heat and steam transportation in the Hotlands. The passageway led up to a house that looked eerily familiar, but lacked the same touches as the King’s home. 

 

Exploring the house showed a spotless kitchen, some snail soup inside the fridge. The dining room had a dark fireplace, a book lie open and unread on the seat of a large comfortable looking chair.He turned the other way to give the other side of the house a look. A children’s room, one with laundered folded sheets and a variety of children’s shoes in a box, and a room that appeared to be locked. He’d rather not break into it if he didn’t have to, so he continued on. 

 

The next room was hers, he assumed. There was a break in the fastidious order here, signs of exhaustion as the bed was made with creases and the throw blanket was arranged lopsidedly. A journal was left out on the desk, next to a unwashed cup with golden flower tea leaves at the bottom.

 

“sorry lady…” Sans muttered under his breath, feeling bad for snooping, particularly after she was gone but she WAS gone and he wanted to find answers if he could. He still wasn’t sure if he judged the child correctly, not until he started looking at the entry the journal was open on. Nothing but a lot of half-drawn and crossed out letters, like she was going to say something but stopped. He opened the book to the day before. Then read another entry. He had to go through a few entries before he could piece together the whole story. So she’d gotten sick from whatever the human had.

 

He reviewed the information with a slow tapping on the old lady’s desk, feeling that this conclusion fit his observation. For a moment, he was merely sad, but satisfied that he’d judged the human correctly. Itching a little over in his eyesocket, he rubbed the crest of his zygomatic bone reflexively and found that a little dust remained stuck to him.

 

With dawning horror, he realized two things much too late.

 

1) The old lady’s dust was likely contagious.

 

2) That same dust had blown out into Snowdin Forest when he’d opened the door.

 

~

 

After the human had passed through the barrier, everything seemed to get worse in the Underground, particularly for Papyrus. Not only did the human kill King Asgore, but that same day Sans failed to come home. The first day of this he had assumed that maybe Sans was out late drinking at Grillby’s, since he’d gone to bed early to process the events of the day. He was happy that his human friend had gotten free but… there was no more King Asgore.

 

He hadn’t been sure what was going to happen next.

 

He awoke to find the house just as he left it, with no sign of Sans and when he reported to the Royal Guard that morning Undyne was gone as well. It was only then that he found out that with the power vacuum, Undyne had no choice but to step up as Empress.

 

Harboring feelings of betrayal, it had only taken a day for her to decree that all humans were to be executed on sight. By then, Papyrus hadn’t seen Sans for a full day, and truly began worrying. He left over a 100 voicemails and 253 texts to Sans’s phone with no avail. His brother had simply vanished like he’d taken a shortcut out of his life.

 

Then came the Snowdin Sickness.

 

It started out in the dog pack of the Royal Guard first, complaining of itching and chewing away at themselves. Papyrus didn’t know too much about it then, just that one time he glimpsed red spots on a bald spot on Doggo’s paw, the monster scratching so much that they were oozing blood and sticking fur to the injury which made him chew at himself even more. He tried to help Doggo find something to relieve the itch with, but cold spaghetti wasn’t what anyone could call help. The best that could be said for it was that the plate the spaghetti was frozen to made a passable cold compact that numbed out the itching sensation. The day after, he didn’t show up to his station.

 

Dogaressa reported to work long enough to inform the rest of the pack and Papyrus that Dogamy was sick and promptly left to nurse him back to health. After that, Papyrus didn’t get a chance to see what happened to Greater and Lesser Dog, as he was starting to feel under the weather himself. 

 

He excused himself one meeting before the day shift begun and the nausea overcame him within minutes of arriving home, so that he raced to throw up convulsively into the toilet. He stopped for a moment, feeling his body tremble and ache. He made the mistake of trying to get off of his knees, only to collapse over the bowl heaving again and wishing Sans was here. By the time he managed to pull himself free of the tyranny of the toilet, he was shambling down the hall to his bed and falling into his racecar bed to remain feverishly awake but delirious for the next few hours.

 

He dreamed that Sans was there in the room with him, but there was parts of him bubbling and melting away, his mouth welling with red and dripping all over the sheets. When he would look directly at Sans though, he would just melt away to his peripheral to start the process again, getting closer but never touching. When he screwed his eyes shut, the walls were crawling with thorny vines, and it was his friend Flowey crooning, “Golly! I’ve died before but it wasn’t anything like this! How does it feel for death to be crawling in your very marrow? I’ll bet it’s realll interesting in there, sweating dust and bile~”

 

Flowey’s face morphed into a sharp toothy grin. His vines punched out of the mattress of his bed and looped around Papyrus’s spine to snap him in half while he merely laid there, the fever wracking his body so that he trembled into pieces-

 

And then suddenly the vines were gone but it was Asgore this time, leaning over with a cup of golden tea leaves. The leaves were molding with white fuzz visibly growing, worm-like hyphae twisting and grasping the edges of the teacup, but the mountain king was examining it like it was the most interesting thing in the world. “Howdy young Papyrus. Have you heard the story of the human doctor that invented the vaccine? He ground up the bunny’s spinal cord… and then injected it into a young boy. What will it take to cure monsterkind of our troubles, do you think?”

 

“WHERE DID YOU GO?” Papyrus wanted to say, but he couldn’t form a tongue with his body scattered intodetached bones. Asgore nodded sadly anyways, as if he expected this, and tipped the cup over. Hyphae wriggled out and as he was forcibly ripped apart, he was put back together again, his mind a thousand miles away from the crawling along his body as daylight entered the window...

 

He woke up in a stranger’s bed that morning, feverish and feeling worse than ever for it. He got about halfway sitting up before dizziness forced him back down, and a cool damp hand, smooth with blue glimmering scales pressed a even damper wash cloth over his skull. Undyne’s voice turned soft with concern, floated over the buzzing in his head. “Shit Papyrus, stay down if you can’t get up you dumb nerd.”

 

He opened his eyesockets, regretting it almost immediately as the light seemed to pierce his skull, to see Undyne in her regular spaghetti-strap tank top and skinny jeans. He croaked with diminished volume, “Aren’t you supposed to be in the capitol?”

 

“I am! And so are you, you’ve been out for days. Word about the Snowdin Royal Guard being taken down by this measely sickness reached the capitol, so I had backup sent to quarantine the area and sent some of the worst off to Al…”

 

Undyne’s voice sounded far away, part of the background as he felt himself sinking back down into the depths of the rising buzzing tide of unconsciousness. The last thing he feels is the wet warming cloth rubbing his skull furiously like the sickness could be cleaned off of him with the cold sweat and chalky calcium cast off of his bones.

 

~

 

She knew this was probably the stupidest thing she’s ever done including letting the big idiot join the Royal Guard, but after he lost Sans, Undyne couldn’t leave Papyrus to sweat it out in that big empty house or stuck with the other sick and dying in Alphys’s lab. It’s not that she didn’t trust Alphys 100% of course, but after everything that’s happened, looking out for Papyrus’s well-being was the last shred of normalcy that she had left. 

 

She hadn’t heard from Alphys that day, but as she wasn’t on the social network, she could only imagine the cute lizard was furiously busy. Once the first reports trickled up to the Hotlands, Alphys had messaged Undyne with the quarantine plans as well as having prepared suits to keep the healthy Royal Guard evacuating the sick to her lab. Undyne was grateful for Alphys’s preparedness, if it wasn’t for her quick thinking then the Snowdin Sickness would’ve become the Underground Plague.

 

As it was, after receiving the reports of the sick and dying, she found out that the parameter of the quarantine was creeping up to the Waterfall regardless of their best efforts. It was getting to the point where shes suspected that the Snowdin Sickness was threatening the water supply that flowed through the Underground.

 

She declared a state of emergency. Residents were not to go swimming or to drink water without first filtering and boiling it. No one was to come into contact with dust, and dust was not to be spread on the deceased monster’s favorite items. The dust had to be chemically sterilized and buried. 

 

After a long day of receiving news and imposing new rules in response, she came staggering back to Papyrus’s sick room, in the room where Asgore’s children used to stay, and checked on him. His ribcage was rattling with each breath and even though he didn’t have the characteristic welts of other monsters on his bones, he was getting worse. She had hope for him when he woke up the day after he was transferred to the capitol, but he soon slipped back into a fitful sleep and his fever refused to break. His bones looked brittle and were producing a fine powder that Undyne didn’t trust. She wore a medical mask, and padded the headboard of the bed so that he couldn’t bash his skull in as he slept. He whimpered as she gingerly elevated his head and trickled milk through his open mouth. She hoped that his body would use it to rebuild what he was shedding off of his bones.

 

“Bunnies… spines…” He murmured. Undyne had no idea what that was supposed to mean, but maybe he was dreaming of story book. She’d read it to him often enough in the last few days, hoping that she was doing it right. 

 

Undyne ran a check over Papyrus. His HP had suddenly began dipping that morning, and she had a sinking feeling she knew what was happening. “Sorry you big nerd, but I need to know…”

 

She traced the erratic beat of his soul, and pulled it out so that it was floating above him in the bed, swearing under her breath at the sight.

 

The gentle orange soul was covered in pearlescent white sores, swollen and painful. She returned the soul to its proper place and sat there next to him, her head in her hands quietly for a moment. The clock ticked, the loudest thing in the room. Without warning she stood up, and left, unable to remain in that room a moment longer. She stalked to the throne room, approaching the throne, and punched it with all of her might. “NGAHHHHHHHH!!!”

 

Her fist went straight through the upholstery, the well-constructed throne standing no chance against her bout of pure frustrated rage. Tears blurring her vision, she was about to kick in the leg of the chair when her ringtone suddenly sang out and gave her pause. She lowered her leg, and glanced at the phone, seeing that it was Alphys and forcing composure before answering.

 

“Hey.” She answered hoarsely, plopping down on throne that she was destroying just a moment ago.

 

“U-u-undyne, I-I-I think I have a…”

 

Alphys’s stutters tapered off, clearly nervous about speaking over the phone. Undyne pushed aside her grief and most of all, her impatience, to soothe the anxious Royal Scientist. “Take a deep breath Alphys, there’s no rush.”

 

Alphys took a deep breath, and then another, and despite everything, Undyne could feel herself breathing with her and her own hysteria subsiding a few notches. “I t-think I have a vaccine.”

 

Undyne straightened up, her eye going wide and her hand stifling an audible gasp. “So soon?!”

 

“I-I-I had a little t-time b-before things got bad…” Alphys mumbled, but Undyne whooped.

 

“YES!!! YES YES YES!!! ALPHYS THAT’S AMAZING!! How soon can it be distributed?!” Her mind was going through a million ideas at once, scratching her forearm absentmindedly, before Alphys squeaked.

 

“N-no! It’s just a p-prototype, I haven’t tested it on any monsters yet…” She tried to rationalize.

 

“I’ll take anything at this point Alphys, but we don’t act now, Papyrus is going to die. This sickness has progressed to invading his  _ soul _ .”

 

The phone static crackled as Alphys processed this, then a heavy sigh is heard.  “I- okay, Undyne. B-bring Papyrus to the lab, b-but c-carefully!”

 

~

 

If Alphys knew Sans, he might’ve anticipated Papyrus ending up on the examination table some day when he showed up to the lab, wearing a mask and gloves over his hands. Alphys had hardly placed Mettaton’s torso on her desk, looking at the damage done to all the individual parts when he literally popped into existence, the displaced air snapping irritably and causing her to shriek and fall off her chair.

 

“listen alphys, do you have the decontamination chamber still operating? heh, i uh, really need a visit to it asap.” Sans remarked as one would make note of the weather. The only thing that even made her register what he said was his pallor. He was a skeleton, so he didn’t have any skin to go by, but even so he had turned a chalky white and his eyelights weren’t present. “oh and don’t touch me. don’t even breathe near me. put on a hazard suit or make one up.”

 

Sans had hardly been in a decontam chamber for a day before he starting showing symptoms. For someone with no lungs, he’d certainly coughed a lot, deep and bone rattling with nothing coming up. In that time, he had debriefed her on everything he’d learned even through the developing cough, from the human falling down with a near-fatal sickness, to the lady behind the door of the Ruins who had nursed them to health only to fall victim to the same mysterious illness. By then, they’d successfully set up the equipment to monitor Sans’s vitals through his soul and had taken multiple biopsies from the marrow in his ulna.

 

They had expected some form of the rosy rash that was described in the lady’s journal to manifest, but it wasn’t until Sans’s naps started lasting longer and longer that she could see the changes on his soul. Pearlescent protrusions were growing, and before long he wasn’t waking up, just shivering under the assault that the sickness had inflicted on his soul. 

 

Alphys had to act on her own from here on out. The news was coming in just as Sans had predicted, that monsters that entered Snowdin Woods regularly were getting sick. Before Sans’s one HP trickled down to zero, she had been busy taking samples from his soul, feeling more and more nauseous with worry as Sans went from flinching in his feverish slumber to not reacting at all the next day.

 

Under the microscope, Alphys could see in the samples that Sans’s magic had coated the virus. Absolutely fascinating, but for Sans, it was absolutely useless. By the time she was able to process what she was seeing and start formulating a prototype of a vaccination, he had collapsed into dust, his besieged soul shattered.

 

She was afraid to use the vaccine she produced on anyone. The DT experiments had gone so horribly awry, and this was the first thing she might’ve done right since then but… she’d only gotten three usable doses from Sans’s soul before he’d died. 

 

Sample one was about to be deployed.

 

Papyrus, unlike his brother, had much higher HP and survived much longer but he was nearing the end of his HP bar. She had his soul summoned, and fixed to the same albeit recently sterilized life support system that had kept Sans going until his soul had collapsed under the stress. Her sense of deja vu looking down at the weakened soul was strong, the difference being that Undyne was waiting outside the lab, likely pacing with impatience and sick with worry herself.

 

“Not… happy bunny…” Papyrus mumbled. “Don’t break their spine Flowey...” Alphys paused, unease making her scaled skin prickle cold. She didn’t know how Sans’s brother knew of Flowey, but the very mention of that failed experiment was ominous enough to make her regret everything that she’s ever done and about to do right now. 

 

“W-what d-d-did you s-say?” She backed from the sleeping skeleton, heavily considering walking out the door and just quitting. Flat out.

 

He’s tossing and turning in his sleep, his expression twitching into a sad grimace, and with a sudden jolting flinch he settles down again. “Sans…”

 

Alphys relaxes bit by bit, her heart still pounding, doubt and regret still furiously roaring for a hasty retreat but advancing nonetheless. She couldn’t fail Sans, not after he bet everything on her to develop a cure. Placing the needle back to Papyrus’s soul, she uttered a short plea to the stars above-

 

“P-please work…”

 

She pushed the plunger in, the effect of doing so becoming immediately and frighteningly apparent. Papyrus screamed, writhing on the table violently, his spine forming a sharp ‘C’ before Alphys had to quickly remove the empty needle to throw to the side and attempt to pin him down. At some point she vaguely became aware of an amalgamate next to her, holding his head and cushioning him from the unyielding examination table.

 

“WHAT’S HAPPENING?! PAPYRUS!!!” Undyne burst in, and upon seeing Alphys struggling to hold him down by his shoulders, raced to push him completely flat on the table leaving Alphys to quickly tend to his soul. It was flaring with an angry light and the life support system that was keeping the HP from dropping was projecting a rising staccato of frantic beeping.

 

Eventually Papyrus quieted down long enough for them to slowly let go, and the life support signals normalized enough for Alphys to calm down long enough to realize that Undyne was in the same room as the spoon-shaped amalgamate that appeared only to tuck patients in.

 

She gasped harshly, but the amalgamate disappeared before Undyne looked up. “Alphys, is Papyrus going to be okay?”

 

Her heart pounding in her chest, she was only able to give a little shrug before her eyes rolled up into her head and fall into a dead faint.

 

Sometime later when Alphys was conscious again, she was quickly confronted by the reality that she failed to produce a vaccine. She’d checked Papyrus’s vitals to find that after all that, nothing had really changed. Even worse, she witnessed not only Undyne scratching a rash that was developing on her forearm, but the amalgamates contracting the Snowdin Sickness starting with the one that had helped them stabilize Papyrus. 

 

“Undyne y-y-you’re getting sick!”   
  
“I… know.” Undyne admitted begrudgingly. “I should’ve known better but…” She kept dabbing a damp cloth to Papyrus’s forehead absently, not explaining herself any further. On her other side was the reports she received that day, unread although they had been opened for that purpose.

 

“W-will you at least t-take one of the other vaccine doses? M-m-maybe it won’t be too late for it to work o-o-on you…” Alphys tried.

 

“NO!”

 

Undyne refused the vaccination, but was forced to remain in the lab while the capitol coped without her. She looked after Papyrus as she slowly became more symptomatic.

 

Then a day passed. No change from Papyrus- no better, no worse. The amalgamates however, seemed to cycle through a state of extreme illness and perfect health, the DT that was omnipresent in their systems having a confusing effect on the progression of the viral attack.

 

Papyrus’s HP was falling again, and out of desperation Alphys injected the second vaccination. This time, there seemed to be no effect. Undyne joked that she felt like she’d done a thousand push-ups without having done a thing all day. Alphys didn’t have the heart to tell her that the myalgia was a sign of the disease progressing.

 

The amalgamates were back to normal though, as if nothing had ever happened to them. Alphys was sitting in front of a computer monitor, fighting mind-numbing panic as she thought ‘ _ They’re all going to die, and there’s nothing I can do to help except turn them into amalgamates and the stars knows that’s a fate worse than death-’ _ when Endogeny dripped over her, mouth-hole dripping that off-putting slime onto her unwashed lab-coat.

 

She shooed them off, and returned to sitting there and staring blankly as the glistening slobber slowly cooled on her coat. The only lead she had was that Sans’s magic would coat around the virus and force it into stasis but what good is that defense if the virus was developing too rapidly for the magic to contain it? It had to ALL be placed under stasis at once, or it would mutate…

 

...At the same rate that the Amalgamates mutated. Suddenly, Alphys was looking at Endogeny’s slime on her coat like it held the secrets to life itself. Undyne hardly had the chance to look up and see the little yellow and white blur as Alphys raced past them to lock herself into the inner lab to take samples from all of the Amalgamates.

 

Overnight and without any breaks even for sleep or food, she developed a single vaccination, but containing five different strains of protective magic. This time, Papyrus was hardly responsive to the injection, his HP too low for him to muster the strength to violently reject the intrusion. Without waiting to see what would happen, Alphys retreated back into the inner lab to produce more of the same thing.

 

Papyrus’s HP was stable again, but low. Alphys managed to produce six more vaccinations over the course of the day. She was getting low on the right supplies, but fortunately Mettaton could enter the lab and after a stand-in with the sterilization chamber, he could walk out pathogen-free to retrieve lab supplies. He didn’t even protest the assignment, seeing his viewers fall away to the illness so suddenly, he merely took the list and set to ‘going shopping’.

 

That night, Undyne and several of the sicker monsters received those six vaccinations, but after working nonstop Alphys was forced to pass out from exhaustion after. When she woke up in the early evening, she had stumbled into the lab bleary eyed to see a skeleton serving ramen noodles covered in marinara to a child monster with no arms. 

 

Papyrus was finally awake. 

 

Alphys checked his vitals- he ripped his soul out from the life support machine himself, so it needed patching up- and although he was awake his HP was no better. He was in fact, stabilizing at a measly 3 HP. And yet,  _ the vaccination worked. _

 

Alphys wasted no time producing more vaccinations, distributing them as fast as they were made and soon most monsters in the lab was stabilizing. The ones that didn’t… well, she couldn’t find Endogeny or Snowdrake’s mother until she discovered them both in the bathtub with yet another amalgamate reminding her that she also had yet to report Sans's death to Papyrus and Undyne. She felt a weight settle over her shoulders.

 

She failed them yet again.

 

Once Undyne returned to the throne, she and Alphys were to find out that in the brief time that they were locked up in her lab, roughly 75% of the population from Snowdin to the Waterfall had fallen seriously ill. The Snowdin Royal Guard particularly, suffered total losses with the exception of Papyrus. Residents of Snowdin were not to return to their homes in the foreseeable future, creating their first real ghost town and guaranteeing the Snowdin Sickness becoming a monster legend for generations to come.

**Author's Note:**

> This wasn't supposed to be this long, and I wasn't supposed to murder this many people. O_O I also had previously intended to have more of a focus on Undyne and Papyrus, but then my science background kicked in pretty hard and before I knew it, the word count had skyrocketed! Oops. I hope you enjoyed the angst Soul! Happy birthday? X'D
> 
> Edit: I forgot some interesting facts that I know which might add some dimension to the story!
> 
> Fact 1: This story parallels Edward Jenner's work, in that the Snowdin Sickness is actually symptomatically that of smallpox. As such, the way Alphys used the blisters to begin working on the vaccination is much like Edward Jenner's observations in the late 18th century, when he noticed that milkmads who got cowpox didn't seem to get smallpox, and used the tissue of a cowpox blister to innoculate a young boy.   
> Fact 2: Later on (I did have to compare timelines and brush up to make sure this is correct), Louis Pasteur who is famous for the Pasteurization process and developing germ theory, produced a rabies vaccine by taking spinal tissue from a rabbit that was infected and injecting it into a boy that had recently been bitten by a rabid dog. Amazingly, it worked and the boy survived. In regards to this fic, my mind hooked onto the idea of crushing rabbit spines and Papyrus's favorite bedtime story, and the result was this semi-prophetic nightmare for Papyrus as he endured the throes of his fever dreams.
> 
> I got this info from my classes, but here's some quickie internet research for those interested.  
> https://www.wired.com/2007/07/dayintech-0706/  
> http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/jenner-tests-smallpox-vaccine


End file.
